Thursday, September 29, 2005

Build your oen MP3 player

Monday, September 26, 2005

CVS Night Vision Cam

Here is yet another reason to buy a few of these CVS cameras. You can remove the IR filter on the CCD and bingo, you now have an IR camera. Add a few IR diodes (you need another resistor, the schematic is flawed) and your no longer banging in the dark.

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Laser Guided Computer via Webcam

This is a very clever hack, use a computer that that is running an image recognition program to see where a laser pointer is being shot. What you get is the ability to literally point and shoot an application.

Hacking RFID gas passes

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Mac Mini Robot

Very cool, now how can I get a Mac Mini donated to me so I can build one?

This is a description of a mobile robot using an Mac Mini and iSight camera for tele-operation. The purpose of this project is to see what it is like to control to robot using the built-in visual and aural sensors before designing an agent to do the same task. The robot is a Pioneer 3-AT made by ActivMedia and the Mac Mini was graciously provided by Apple computer at no charge

Mod Your Video!

Now this is handy. Far too many time you have a video file in one format but you need it in a different format and your at your wits end to figure out how to do this. I've used this site far too many time myself in figuring out to geet where I want to go.

This site will help you to make your own VideoCDs, SVCDs or DVDs that can be played on your standalone DVD Player from video sources like DVD, Video, TV, DV, Cam or downloaded movie clips like DivX, MOV, RM, WMV and ASF.

BBHPDA - Analog PDA

Years ago I had an idea for a spoof product called a 'PAD' (Personal analog Assistant) It was simply a pad of paper but the joke was that it could do all the things that a PDA could and more (The Palm was al the rage back then) Looks like others have had the same idea and have actualy made one that woks.Bare bones Hipster PDA

Hamster Fighter

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

CVS Camcorder Rocket Project

This is an amazing hack! Not only is it a modded rocket but it's got one of those great CVS video cameras in it. The quality is impressive seeing as the video camera isn't made for something like this at all.

Photoshop Tutorials

Always handy to have on hand.

Not good with Photoshop, or just want to learn more. This is a great website that has tons of tutorials. Forums and other information can be found at 13dots.com, this link is specifically for the Photoshop tutorials.

FireWire bandwidth over coaxial cable!

I'd call this a big hack, but not a huge one. Think about it, coax can carry the bandwidth of cable TV (apx 6MHz) and digital AND your high speed Internet. If it comes to pass it might be cool. My question, how long can the cable be?

Call it FireWire or call it IEEE-1394, but whatever name you use will describe what may bring the lowly coaxial cable back into the fold. That's right, coax could leap ahead of all of the other audio and video connections out there: component, composite, S-Video, DVI and even HDMI!

Thursday, September 08, 2005

Spy Finder

Such a simple concept, the lens of the offending camera will act like a retro reflector and light up like a star when your viewing it on axis to a beam of light. I think I'm going to build one of these.

iPod nano ハードウェアレポート

Fresh out of the Apple store in Ginza, the good guys at PCWatch have disected the entire Nano, product box included!Nice to see that it can be opened (a warrenty voiding procedure no doubt) but bad to see that the battery is soldered in place. I could change it out when it dies but most people would never even think of doing that. Anyway, its a good read even if you have a hard time with the translated Japanese.Translated versionOriginal version iPod nanoハードウェアレポート

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

Dead Computer Night

I got home tonight and noticed that the hard drive light on my main system was looking... weird. like it was blinking at but at an odd duty cycle so that is looked dim.I powered up the monitor and instead of the screen saver it simply said 'PRESS ANY KEY TO REBOOT'. There goes my evening.I tried a number of different boot configurations but nothing worked. It would power up, ask if I wanted to boot into XPpro or 2000 and then prompt me with the usual apologies about not shutting down correctly and would you like to boot into safe mode. Most of the computer I see at this point won't even boot into safe mode, mine was no different.I set it to not reboot on an error in hope that I'd spot something useful. I was rewarded by a nice BSOD stating that the boot drive was unmountable. Well what the hell had I been working off from so far?Time for the recovery CD. It would have been nice to have had this happen to a system with a CD drive in it but that went away long ago in order to hold more hard drives. Good thing my Debian Linux box is sitting on a shelf not doing anything. After a bit of surgery I had a working CD drive on my XP box and was ready to get back to work. I booted off the CD and went int orecivery mode, a little touch and go there too. I had to boot twice because the first time the install script blew up on line 5400 (!). I thought that my CD drive was screwed up or heaven forbid, my XP CD was damaged! I don't think that Microsoft will replace one if you send it back. I suspect that having their customers pay $200 for media makes them smile quite a bit.Anyway, I think I got off lucky because it just took a CHKDSK and a FIXBOOT to solve the problem. Sounds like its about time that I get rid of some of my older smaller drives, I need to free up some space and do some migration soon.

WRt54G SD card reader mod

Wow! Ok, another link to Linksys WRT54G hacking:

This project is for people who would like to add a little storage to their Linksys WRT54G router besides the builtin 4MB flash ram. What we will do is connect an SD card reader to some of the GPIO pins of the CPU found inside the Linksys and with the help of a little driver we can use as a block device from Linux. This means that if you compile your kernel for the Linksys with e.g. support for MSDOS partitions and VFAT you will be able to mount, read, write, partition and so on your normal SD cards. The speed obtainable for reading and writing seems to be about 200 KB/s.

The GPIO pins run of 3.3 volts so it is handy to have a 3.3 volt power source. There are a few places you can get power from the WRT54G. At first I used the serial port pins 1 & 10, but then I neede to attach a serial port so I switched to the JTAG plug. JTAG howerver does NOT supply power, so that did not work and I switched back to the serial port. I recommend that you solder in the header pins on top, and then take power from that. If however you want to run serial as well, you can solder onto the underside of you header pins. You can solder directly onto the board, but it becomes a pain if you want to remove them and attach a serial port.

WRT54G - Router or robot?

It first started out as an R/C car with a hope of putting and ATX MB on it but then the evil weight and space issue killed that notion. However, he was able to mod the Linksys routers eight GPIO pins to control an H-bridge and BAM! A robot was born.

USB HotWheels Flash Drive Mod

Aww crap. I had this idea six months ago... Cool idea but he (or I) needs to take it to the next level. NASCAR branded USB cars. Yep, get a 1 GB memory key in the shape of your favorite NASCAR car. Pop the trunk and expose the USB plug. Cool, eh? If you see one make sure I get some royalties.

Welcome!

Welcome to HackerMonkey! Soon to be the home of hundreds of posts about anything you can take a screwdriver to and 'bend to your will'. Think 'MAKE' meets 'Hackaday' meets a mad scientist will all sorts of crazy ideas.So come back real soon and check it out.